My CATESOL Conference Report, Part 3

After picking up a sandwich and ice tea at the Wolfgang Puck's Express food counter at the Convention Center, I hurried upstairs to join in the Community College Level Rap. The outgoing Community College Level Chair, Laura Walsh of City College of San Francisco, did a good job in moving the discussions along. The issues that concerned most attendees were:

1. The degree-applicable ESL courses. Mark Lieu, the statewide Academic Senate President and an ESL professor from Ohlone College, was on hand to explain the latest Title V language change that delinked ESL composition courses from English composition courses, thus making it possible for more ESL courses to be qualified as degree-applicable. I was glad that due to foresight and luck, the academic courses in our dept. have long enjoyed not only AA-degree applicability but also some CSU and UC transferability. With the new ruling, we can walk with our heads held high, so to speak, not worrying if the status of our academic courses would be questioned any more.
   
2. The ESL data newly included in the statewide ARCC (Accountability Reporting for Community Colleges). As was the case for many other ESL departments, our ESL improvement rate in the report looked very bad. Mark Lieu explained that we ought to look at how our raw data, including the course coding, got reported to the state because that was what the state depended on for the report.
   
3. The financial picture. CATESOL's legislative advocate Dr. Jeff Frost, who had been making the rounds from level rap to level rap, predicted a very bleak outlook for the state budget in the next two years. Some kind of tax hike may have to happen to tide California's education over this crisis.
   
4. The labor division between adult ed and community colleges. Jeff Frost said that there was no clear-cut legal stipulations as to who offers noncredit classes for adult learners in the community. The division had been local, by inter-district agreements and past practices.

What's up next in the same room was the Community College Level Workshop titled "Successful ESL Programs and Students." I saw Katheryn sitting on the front row in the audience from the previous session, so I moved up there to be next to her. The first panelist was Laura Walsh again. She explained the standard measures of student success. The short-term ones were:

1. course completion (or success) rate: completed with a grade of A, B, C, D (used to be counted as success in the CSU system), CR
2. course retention rate: completed with a grade of A, B, C. D, F, CR, NCR (This means all the students who stayed to the end of the semester. I couldn't help but think of the value of assigning FW at Palomar because if we insisted on giving an F to students who disappeared, our retained percentage would look bad. In other words, an FW given to a student meant that the student did not stay until the end.)
3. term or year persistence: registered and enrolled at census in the following term or year
4. number of units successfully completed
5. mean gpa.

She provided an example from her college to illustrate the above short-term measures.

Long-term success measures, on the other hand, were:

1. number of units completed (with 30 and 60 units benchmarks, the former indicating half way for transfer and the latter being the standard for transfer)
2. preparation for transfer: 60 units with transfer-level math and English completed, as opposed to just random courses taken
3. transfer to a four-year institution
4. transfer to another two-year institution, i.e. lateral transfer, which should still be counted as success for the student
5. degree or certificate completion (A research finding cited by Laura said students with degree goals went much further than those with personal goals, but some in the audience still questioned why reaching personal goals were not counted as a success measure)
6. subsequent degree from four-year institution or subsequent employment.

The second panelist was graduate student Yueh-ching Chang of California Community College Collaborative (C4), UC Riverside. Her slide show was titled "Transferring Promising Practices (TPP) in Community College--English as a Second Language Programs." One of the several challenges in community college ESL that she talked about was how to identify and then serve ESL students, many of whom shunned an ESL label. Another challenge was how to increase learning gains, which had these two main barriers:

1. instructional time
2. instructional methods (There's no support for instructors to devise meaningful contexts for students to really increase learning gains.)

Among the promising practices in community college ESL:

1. high intensity programs (up to 25 hours a week, with exit requirements) with managed enrollment (open only the first few days of the term in order to force student commitment)
2. extending learning beyond the classroom (i.e. authentic learning)
3. curricular integration with content courses (This reminded me of the plenary speaker at last fall's San Diego Regional, Professor Frank Noji of Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii, whose ESL colleagues created their syllabi aligned with those of mainstream courses, aiming for a rooted relevance. I blogged about this on Oct. 22, 07.)
4. recruiting and retaining high quality ESL faculty (A good faculty resource center could contribute to such faculty retention.)

Laura commented how Yueh-ching's promising practices in her research findings actually jived with the best practices cited in the statewide Basic Skills Initiative documents.

The just-retired ESL Dept. chair of City College of San Francisco, Sharon Seymour, took the floor next. Her slide show was entitled "Noncredit ESL Student Transition to Credit at CCSF." Sharon and her CCSF colleagues had been very active in partnering with the Council for Advancement of Adult Literacy (CAAL) to be at the center of special study projects on adult ESL, resulting in such monumental documents as Torchlights in ESL and Pathways and Outcomes.

It was interesting to note the program design for noncredit students at CCSF, which includes:

• a general ESL program that meets 10 hours a week and offers 10 levels from literacy to low advanced
• a focus ESL program that meets 5 hours a week and focuses on discrete skill areas
• an accelerated ESL program that covers two levels in one term and serves as a program enhancement for selected students.

Having shared the findings of a longitudinal study (98 to 06) done at CCSF, Sharon concluded with several suggestions to increase noncredit to credit transition:

• provide matriculation services by giving everyone a placement test, for example
• structure programs by shortening the term, for example, to maximize student advance
• try fast-tack programs
• target students most likely to succeed (I would like to know how exactly they did this.)

The last panelist to speak was Prof. Mark Roberge of San Francisco State University, who is best known for his work on Gen 1.5 issues. Mark's talk focused on "Making the Jump to Junior-year Composition." Mark first listed the challenges in preparing transfer students for upper-division English requirements:

1. Gate-keeping mechanisms: CSU's GWAR (graduation writing assessment requirement), for example
2. Articulation of curricula
3. Differences in standards and expectations
4. No real upper-division support at CSUs.

Mark then suggested some solutions for community college teachers:

1. Go beyond one-genre writing. Don't just require four "pro-con" essays. We need descriptive, summary writing, etc. One technique is to start with a topic and then decide what rhetorical pattern(s) to use in the essay. Although GWAR typically calls for writing of the "agree/disagree" type, in students' majors, they will do lots of tech-response kind of writing, such as synthesizing, summarizing, etc.
2. Analyze the task (i.e. decode writing assignments and essay prompts) and hidden expectations.
3. Prepare students to self-scaffold assignments. The writing process, time line, etc. for a term paper should be a portable skill set.
4. Prepare student for grammatical issues. It's important to figure out standards/expectations for both general population and ESL students. Ten errors per paper may be OK for an ESL instructor who views them as writing with an accent, but a content teacher may impose a 2-error-per-paper limitation.

Exiting the meeting room with Katheryn, she asked if I had attended a CATESOL-board-sponsored morning session on the community college Basic Skills Initiative and the ESL learner. Upon learning that I had not, she gave me a BSI newsletter and pointed out the upcoming BSI regional meetings in June and the statewide training conference in August.

After I thanked Katheryn and we said good-bye to each other, I headed back to Sheraton for the last one on my list of sessions to attend for the day.